By incorporating these improved ideas into your decision-making approach, you can enhance your ability to make sound and effective choices.

  1. Decision-Making Process:

    • Recognize that decision-making is a skill that is often not explicitly taught.
    • Mental models, our cognitive skill set, play a crucial role in decision making.
    • Be aware of cognitive biases and the potential for misinformation or incorrect information.

  2. Critical Decisions:

    • Certain decisions, such as choosing a life partner or deciding where to live, carry significant weight and should be approached with careful consideration.

  3. Developing Judgment:

    • Cultivate a strong foundation of knowledge in various disciplines to foster multidisciplinary thinking.
    • Learn the fundamentals of different fields and use them to derive complex ideas.

  4. General Thinking Concepts:

    • Utilize concepts such as inversion (considering the opposite), second-order thinking (considering the consequences), and understanding that the map is not the territory (recognizing that models are not reality).

  5. Thinking Process:

    • Allocate sufficient time for decision making.
    • Identify the problem clearly.
    • Establish criteria for evaluation.
    • Assign weights to the criteria based on their importance.
    • Evaluate and compare alternatives.
    • Utilize decision matrices for critical and irreversible decisions, conduct reversible experiments for critical decisions, and delegate less critical decisions.

  6. Building Judgment:

    • Lay strong foundations for judgment by deeply understanding important concepts and principles.
    • Maintain a decision journal to reflect on past decisions and learn from them.

  7. Minimizing Stupidity:

    • Remove external factors that create noise and distract from the decision-making process.
    • Strive to see reality objectively by shedding personal identity and biases.
    • Emphasize a systematic decision-making process rather than relying solely on analysis.